Animal Kingdom
stories by Alex Behr
In late 2019, award-winning Portland author Alex Behr reunited with Chris Hartman, a lost love, after thirty years. Their brief, intense romance in San Francisco left behind no photos, and yet they’d never forgotten each other. Chris soon moved to Portland to start a new life with her. Tragically and suddenly, he was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive prion illness, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and died just months after the move.
Tender, erotic, and damned, the nineteen stories in Animal Kingdom are inspired by Behr’s grief. It explores desire and searches for meaning from chaos and loss. With piercing humor, the collection explores a couple bonding over alien visitations, the brutal accommodations in a marriage between musicians, sexuality during menopause, and a teen girl’s bruising path to feminism via her Fender guitar. The stories share the theme that humans can’t escape their primal urges and are intelligent animals in the flawed kingdom we all share.
ADVANCE PRAISE
”There's a lot of meat stuck in the teeth of ANIMAL KINGDOM. In pieces that span topics like IVF, a shitty affair, that one time a nude photo got leaked online, mental health, transracial adoption, and the tragic death of a true love, Behr has crafted recognizable characters who rise and fall and re-rise with a musculature that transcends beauty. To say ANIMAL KINGDOM is an unflinching look at the improbability of surviving this mean ol’ world with our breakable spirits intact is insufficient. What Behr has pulled off here is a collection of stories so well-lit, so full-frontal and fully engaged in the act of seeing that the gross and messy reality of living in a fallible body with a stupid heart is illuminated and elevated to a vital read.”
—Allisa Cherry, author of An Exodus of Sparks
“Alex Behr’s ANIMAL KINGDOM is a beautiful yet brutalist interweaving of so many facets of the human condition. It’s as if I witnessed both a coming apart at the seams and then the slow, methodical and often messy stitching back together of a personhood. Yet amidst the suffering, there is also silliness, insight and raw wit. This work of art feels like a metaphor for what it takes to be a human in this world: it truly encompasses all the things at once.”
—Frances Badalamenti, author of Many Seasons
“Perfectly written tales, flush with detail that gives the book the feel of a scrapbook in prose, of the tawdry, the beautiful, the funny, and the unbearably sad.”
—Gregg Turkington, actor/comedian
“Alex Behr’s ANIMAL KINGDOM reads like the ultimate mixtape, curated in the alcoves of the human condition and delivered to your headpiece via a beam of light. While singularly meditative, together these stories work to create a unified mosaic of life, loss, heart, and rebirth. Some read like incantations or alchemical recipes, while others drop you directly into the heightened or more subtle music of everyday passion and the quieter spaces that mysteriously hold us together. There is incredible attention to craft and execution here. But more than anything there is love, in all its staggering forms, on every one of these pages.”
—Jason Arias, author of nostraDAMus 2032
“The pieces that make up Alex Behr’s ANIMAL KINGDOM are feral and wry, enticingly TMI, their language and forms gutsy yet perfectly befitting. The core of every story is tender and wise, declaring, of the heart, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. I snorted laughter, I cried fat tears. I loved this book.”
—Karleigh Frisbie Brogan, author of Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts
“Alex Behr writes with the rhythm of a musician and the courage of someone who isn't afraid to strip naked in public. With raw honesty and almost unbearable intimacy, her stories lead us into the tender places where our own grief, love, and longing live.”
—Kathleen Lane, author of Pity Party
”Alex Behr’s stories prowl through punk clubs and cluttered bedrooms, past dying lovers and feral teens, tuxedo cats and litter boxes, riot hags with bass guitars and diaries they beg you not to read. She smuggles lust, grief, and dark comedy into brilliant fragments, instructions, and lists. ANIMAL KINGDOM is unembarrassed by the body in all its glory and abjection—it is fearless and fiercely alive.”
—Kimberly King Parsons, author of We Were the Universe
”ANIMAL KINGDOM is a stone fruit love song with a delicious punch to the solar plexus. Lonesome, fierce, funny. These stories stay with you.“
—Laura Moulton, author of Loaners: The Making of a Street Library
“There are antecedents—PJ Harvey, Molly Shannon, Nan Goldin, Jane Bowles—for the artistry Alex Behr displays in ANIMAL KINGDOM, where, like Persephone, she’s fated to travel to the land of the dead, returning with these bristling yet tender stories. Behr’s writing, fact or fiction, is sui generis. If her protagonists are damaged, medicated, and vulnerable, they’re also driven and wily, undaunted by risk or cost.”
—Mary Rechner, author of Marrying Friends
”Alex Behr's ANIMAL KINGDOM is the kind of book I am always looking for and most often only find in authors like Ali Smith, Jeanette Winterson, and Marlen Haushofer. Behr's humanity, style, wonder, and visceral way of writing are special in a world that too often leans toward a safe middle. This collection is stark, honest, funny, sad, and very real.”
—Matthew Dickman, author of Husbandry
DEETS
Distribution: Ingram
Pub Date: November 3, 2026
Fiction | 156 pgs
Paperback and eBook | 5.5 x 8.5 in | $21.99 ISBN-979-8-950348-06-8
Publicity: Lori Hettler